AI can write code now.

Which is great news if you hate writing code, and slightly terrifying news if your entire job involves writing code.

Tools like ChatGPT can generate HTML, CSS, JavaScript and even help fix those annoying errors that somehow appear after you changed one tiny thing.

So, is coding becoming obsolete?

Not quite.

AI can write code. But can it think like a developer?

AI can give you code, but it doesn’t necessarily understand what your website actually needs.

You still need to know:

• What the code is doing
• Where it belongs
• Whether it actually works
• Whether it’s secure
• And why the hell it just broke everything

That’s where knowing how to code still matters.

The good news

AI can take care of some of the boring stuff.

Need a starting point for a function? Ask AI.

Can’t figure out why something isn’t working? Ask AI.

Need to spend 45 minutes trying to remember why you forgot a semicolon? Maybe don’t do that one.

Used properly, AI can save developers a lot of time.

The catch

There’s a difference between using AI to help you code and having AI code everything for you.

If you copy and paste everything AI gives you without understanding it, you’re going to have a bad time when something breaks.

And something will break.

Learning to code means learning how to solve problems, experiment, make mistakes and figure out why something isn’t working. Those skills are still valuable, even when AI is sitting beside you offering suspiciously confident answers.

So, are coders doomed?

Probably not.

AI is changing coding, but I don’t think it’s killing it.

The developers of the future might simply spend less time typing every line of code and more time thinking about what the code should actually do.

AI can be another tool in the toolbox.

Just don’t hand it the toolbox and walk away.